Missing Brontë Letter Returns To The Brontë Museum In Haworth

By Emma Robertson

29/08/2008

What did Charlotte Brontë really think of her critics? Visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum will be able to find out thanks to the discovery of a missing letter between the best-selling author and her publisher, William Smith Williams.

The historic communication is returning to Haworth after spending eighty years in the USA. It has been bought with the assistance of a grant from the MLA and V&A Purchase fund.

Dated January 13 1848, three months after the publication of Jane Eyre, the letter details the novelist's response to the reception of her first novel.

Signing herself by her infamous pseudonym, Currer Bell, Brontë gently admonishes Williams for his cherry-picking of favourable reviews.

“You have just culled the best sentences in each review, as if you have been gathering flowers in a parterre,” she writes.

Elsewhere she reflects on the difficult style of the infamous critic, George Henry Lewes, likening it to the acquired taste of olives.

“They are said to taste harshly at first and to become agreeable with custom,” she says. “The same may in some measure be observed of Mr Lewes’ letters.”